Review: 'Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! More Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema'

Armed with a great deal of old-school research, some over-heated writing, and an embarrassing "Watch out! The Progressive Mob is coming to burn your DVD collection!!!" foreword, Greg Mank returns for a semi-sequel to his chaotic 2014 book The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror called Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! More Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema. This time Mank tightens up his approach for (mostly) uniformly formatted chapters to examine how classics such as Murders in the Rue Morgue, Island of Lost Souls, Mad Love, House of Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein, mediocrities such as Werewolf of London and the 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and crap-fests like Captive Wild Woman fared against Joseph Breen's censorship board. 

Mank consults period documents to carefully note instances of censorious notes, how the filmmakers followed or worked around the meddlesome directives, and how regional exhibitors made their own cuts. In the case of Werewolf of London (which he insists on typing as WereWolf of London), the author argues that it could have been a better film without such changes as bumping a prostitute character down to the role of alms beggar. In the case of Captive Wild Woman, he offers no such possible avenues for improvement or redemption, and despite the author's dopey opening, he actually comprehends why folks were so horrified by the film's likening of black women to apes. That's pretty surprising since Mank thinks you're a dummy if you take offense at The Mask of Fu Manchu, an equally ugly pile of rubbish with a "happy" ending that involves Asian genocide by ray gun. Not a whole lot of philosophical consistency there, Manky.

Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! switches to soft focus in its concluding chapters that deal with (A) the depressing end of Basil Rathbone's career and (B) how horror performed at the box office in the thirties and forties. These chapters don't quite fit with the rest of the book but are as useful to the monster movie historian as the rest of it, which I'll admit is pretty useful.

Review: 'The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema'

I’m ashamed to say I’d never read any of Gregory Mank’s books until The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema. This is a major oversight since he’s regarded as one of our top horror historians, but also because I’ve always really enjoyed Mank’s charming presence in David Skal’s documentaries on The Mummy, Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein. Apparently, Mank’s previous books were quite focused, tackling Frankenstein, women’s roles in thirties horror movies, Karloff and Lugosi’s collaborations, and Dwight Frye, so The Very Witching Time may be an odd starting point. Aside from the general horror theme (which is even tenuous in a chapter or two), the book is unfocused by definition, each chapter taking on a different dark corner of horror history that didn’t quite fit into any of his previous books. There’s a chapter devoted to Helen Chandler, Mina of Browning’s Dracula whose personal life was more miserable than anything she suffered in her most famous role; one on Paramount’s infamously lurid Murders in the Zoo, and an interview with the son of that film’s star, Lionel Atwill; exhaustive production diaries on the very unlike Cat People and Curse of the Cat People; histories of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the far-more horrific Hitler’s Madman, a historical horror show about Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich starring genre-staple John Carradine; and so on.

What unites this variety of nightmares is Mank’s attention to detail, his often-lyrical writing, and the common issues many of these disparate films faced. Censorship was a plague. Scandal dogged a number of the stars (both Atwill and Cat People’s Simone Simon suffered career damage when reports they’d hosted orgies surfaced), making The Very Witching Time occasionally read like a less-overheated Hollywood Babylon. In two of its wilder recollections, the set of Murders in the Zoo turns into a devastating and depressing real-life wildlife battle royal and John Barrymore’s drunk son personally exhumes his father’s fluid-leaking corpse 38 years after it was put in the ground.

There is a lot of dishing in The Very Witching Time of Night, but it is always relevant to the histories and hardly the book’s sole fascination. Some of the chapters are short on revelations (the interview with Atwill’s son and the piece on Boris Karloff's time at Warner Bros., for example), but Horror fans will find the parallels between the lovely and intimate Curse of the Cat People and producer Val Lewton’s life and the inclusion of the Monster’s deleted dialogue from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man riveting stuff. They may also pray he expands his delightful chapter on "Shock! Theatre" with its huge transcript chunks into an entire book. If nothing else The Very Witching Time of Night has finally lit a spark under me to read more Mank.